Differentiation of C2C12 Myoblasts and Characterization of Electro-Responsive Beating Behavior of Myotubes Using Circularly Distributed Multiple Electrodes for Bio-Syncretic Robot

Micro-robots have a great application prospect in the biomedical field due to the feature of small size. To solve the issues of energy supply and bio-compatibility of micro-robots, bio-syncretic micro-robots composed of biological materials and electromechanical systems have been studied widely. The skeletal muscle is a potential material to develop bio-actuator for the bio-syncretic robots on account of the great contraction force and the controllability. However, the low differentiation quality of C2C12s and the control of the bio-syncretic robots are the two of the main challenges for the development of the bio-syncretic robots based on the skeleton muscle. In this paper, an approach based on circularly distributed multiple electrodes (CDMEs) was proposed to improve the differentiation of C2C12 myoblast cells and characterize the electro-responsive beating behavior of myotubes for the development of bio-syncretic robots. Three groups of C2C12 blasts were used to fulfill the differentiation experiments without electrical stimulation and with electrical stimulation using parallel electrodes and CDMEs respectively, for evaluating the effect of CDMEs on C2C12 differentiation. It was demonstrated that electrical field through CDMEs can improve the differentiation quality of C2C12 blasts into myotubes in terms of intensity, length, and widths. Then, the effect of electrical stimulation on the beating behaviors of myotubes was also investigated with CDMEs, and it was shown that the beating amplitudes of myotubes were significantly affected by the frequencies, amplitude and direction of electrical stimulation with respect to the myotubes, which is fundamental for the control of the micro-robot based on skeletal muscle cells. The proposed approach is useful for not only the development of the bio-syncretic robots, but also the study of muscle tissue engineering.

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